The Sunday Times - UK (2022-04-03)

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NEWS

Parliament partied at the

same time as Downing Street

Metro and consuming it on

the parliamentary estate.”

It comes amid claims that

Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the

Speaker of the House of

Commons, has launched a

new crackdown on the

drinking culture within

parliament. According to

sources, several senior

politicians and their staff

have recently had to be

escorted from the estate after

excessive alcohol

consumption. One lobby

journalist was stripped of

their parliamentary pass last

week following reports about

their raucous behaviour.

Guidance has also been

sent to MPs and their staff

warning them not to

drunkenly fall asleep in their

offices overnight after

missing their train home.

A senior Westminster

source said: “Some of the

MPs from the 2019 intake are

very wet behind the ears and

are barely out of university. It

seems they have rather

adopted a freshers’ week

mentality to socialising.”

On Friday, it emerged that

Scotland Yard had issued the

first fixed-penalty notices for

breaches of lockdown rules to

officials who attended a

“raucous” leaving party in the

Cabinet Office in June 2020.

The fines were issued by

email to 20 people, including

several who attended a

gathering to mark the

departure of Hannah Young,

a private secretary in No 10

dealing with home affairs.

Lord Sedwill, who was

then head of the civil service,

briefly attended the gathering

but has so far not been fined.

Yesterday Dominic

Cummings, the prime

minister’s former senior aide,

hit out at the apparent

injustice of “junior” officials

being fined, and accused

Martin Reynolds, the prime

minister’s outgoing principal

private secretary, of being

ultimately responsible.

Scotland Yard has begun

contacting witnesses who are

not accused of wrongdoing.

Senior Whitehall sources

believe it is part of the Met’s

attempt to collect evidence

and build cases against a

number of government

figures who are disputing that

their attendance at the

gatherings broke the law.

A House of Commons

spokesman said: “Throughout

the pandemic, the House of

Commons has consistently

communicated and reiterated

the rules and guidance that

have been in place to ensure

that parliament has been able

to function in line with all

relevant Covid regulations.”

The parties scandal has

reached the House of

Commons with fresh claims

that illicit social events were

attended by ministers, MPs

and their staff during

lockdown.

At least two drinks parties

are being investigated by the

parliamentary authorities,

including one involving a

minister and their special

advisers on the Commons

terrace next to the Thames.

However, sources claim

that security officials may

have logged details of other

secret gatherings in

parliament during the

months when coronavirus

restrictions imposed by the

government prevented

people from socialising.

It is understood that some

of the parties may have

coincided with those held in

Downing Street, including the

event on the evening of the

Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral.

A source said: “The

parliamentary authorities

repeatedly sent guidance to

officials, MPs and their staff,

warning them not to break

the Covid rules. It followed

mounting concern that

groups of people were buying

alcohol from the local Tesco

Caroline Wheeler

and Harry Yorke

10

NEWS

Boris Johnson’s closest aides are calling

it “the crossover point”, the moment he

takes what he has learnt about leadership

during the war in Ukraine and deploys

it on the home front, where political

problems are about to explode.

As MPs left for their Easter break on

Thursday, one minister remarked: “It

feels like the calm before the storm,

Boris’s Phoney War. Churchill’s ended in

May as well.. .”

There was a taste of the kind of politi-

cal blitzkrieg this minister fears on Tues-

day, when Scotland Yard revealed it was

sending out the first 20 fines for govern-

ment officials who attended lockdown

parties. Privately, senior Tories fear a cat-

astrophic set of local elections on May 5

fuelled by public anger at the breaches of

the rules and the impact of the rising cost

of living.

Yet behind the scenes, Johnson last

week held crucial gatherings in order to

shore up his position, developing radical

new plans for Britain’s energy strategy

and the war in Ukraine, plotting his sur-

vival with aides and making peace with

his MPs and his chancellor. Call it “Five

Meetings to Prevent a Political Funeral”.

At the start of the week, he and his

most senior advisers conducted a “stock

take” on what they need to do next. “This

is the crossover point,” one close ally

said. The “Booster Boris” was in evidence

at another meeting on Thursday, when

the prime minister hosted a round-table

discussion on energy strategy. Johnson

admitted he had once believed wind

power “wouldn’t kick the skin off a rice

pudding” but then challenged industry to

build a massive wind farm in the Irish

Sea.

When told: “You can put up a wind tur-

bine in a day but it takes ten years to get

the planning permission,” Johnson said:

Feeling the

Tim Shipman

Chief Political Commentator

Energy bills and fractious MPs have turned up the temperature on a PM trying to save his domestic agenda

“I’d like to build a colossal new wind farm

in a year. If we can discover a vaccine in a

year, why can’t we build these?” When

told that an issue offshore can be the

flight path of birds, he joked: “Why on

earth can’t birds just learn to fly a little

higher?”

The strategy, which is due to be pub-

lished on Thursday, will lay out plans for

a fourfold increase in offshore wind

power and an almost doubling of the

proportion of Britain’s nuclear energy to

25 per cent by 2050. Johnson has pri-

vately joked with aides: “We should put a

small nuclear reactor in every Labour

seat.” The plan will also include new reg-

ulations to allow onshore wind farms if a

local community sees the benefits in

lower electricity bills. Tory internal poll-

ing shows that support from the public

for wind, solar and tidal power is “off the

charts” if people who can see a turbine

get half price or free energy.

No 10 hopes the plan will allow remote

areas of Scotland to move ahead with

wind farms while satisfying Tory MPs in

the shires that local communities will be

able to block them there. Johnson needs

to tread carefully with his backbenchers,

though, who may still submit letters call-

ing for a vote of no confidence in him.

On Tuesday Johnson hosted a dinner

for his parliamentary party at the Park

Plaza hotel, just over Westminster Bridge

from parliament. He attempted to laugh

off the threat from his MPs as “some of

the greatest epistolary letters written

since St Paul”. He likened them to “elas-

tic” because “they go in and you can pull

them out”. But as one MP who has with-

drawn a letter said afterwards: “He isn’t

out of the woods yet. Elastic has a way of

going back in. It is unfinished business.”

In a bid to satisfy MPs, Downing Street

is also jettisoning controversial meas-

ures from the forthcoming Queen’s

Speech because they are unlikely to

pass. “There are a lot of difficult conver-

sations about ditching stuff from the

2019 manifesto,” said an official. “We

keep getting hammered in the Lords

and Boris can’t afford to piss off the MPs.

The health and social care bill and the

immigration bill have had a rough ride.”

Plans to shake up judicial review and

reform the planning system have been

junked. Ministers may also be forced to

ditch plans to scrap legacy prosecutions

from the Troubles in Northern Ireland if

Sinn Féin, as expected, emerges as the

largest party in Stormont.

No 10 is attempting to put a positive

spin on this apparent disarray by telling

MPs it is part of a drive by Steve Barclay,

the new Downing Street chief of staff, to

get the government to be more conserva-

tive. “We don’t believe in government

being in every aspect of people’s lives and

legislating for the sake of it,” said a mem-

ber of Johnson’s team.

With local elections looming, John-

son’s team has been shown polling that

says the Conservatives are on course to

haemorrhage hundreds of seats nation-

wide and lose flagship London councils

such as Wandsworth and Westminster.

One political aide said: “The internal

numbers suggest it will be a dire night-

mare in May. It’s the most downbeat I’ve

seen people about polling in a long

time.”

That will only be compounded

when more partygate fines drop.

No 10 is concerned that 20 officials

have been fined from just one civil ser-

vice leaving do in May 2020. A dozen

are being investigated. “It suggests

that the number getting a fixed-

penalty notice is going to be double,

treble that in the end,” a cabinet

source said.

Among senior Tories there is a

hope, calcifying into an expectation,

that Johnson himself will not be fined

but that his wife, Carrie, who is

accused of holding parties in their

Downing Street flat, may well be. A

cabinet aide said: “It’s the one topic

you can’t raise with anyone in No 10.

It’s like Putin’s Russia in there.” A cabi-

net minister said: “I personally can’t

see him getting a fine. I think you can

make the argument that Downing

Street is a workplace. I don’t think the

same argument can be made about

Carrie.”

Either way, Labour insiders say it

will try to capitalise on partygate dur-

ing the local election campaign, issu-

ing leaflets in key seats that say:

“X number of people died of Covid in

this area while Boris Johnson and his

aides partied.”

But concerns remain about the

effectiveness of the Downing Street

machine. Civil servants in Johnson’s

private office, usually the engine room

of Whitehall, are angry they have been cut

out of decision making. “It’s basically

three middle-aged white men who are

deciding everything,” a political aide said.

The three are Barclay, communications

director Guto Harri and Andrew Griffith,

the No 10 head of policy. It is a close-knit

team. Barclay and Harri were seen drink-

ing together in the London media haunt

Soho House late on Thursday. But they

also presided over farce on Wednesday

when No 10 announced it was scrapping

plans to outlaw gay conversion therapy,

after religious Tories complained, only

immediately to U-turn when dozens of

MPs made clear they would rebel. “The

good thing is that it was done quickly,”

said another aide.

If partygate and the local elections

combine to put Johnson in peril, loyalists

wonder how much support he really

enjoys in cabinet. “Can Boris survive if he

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POLITICS